Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek (2025)

Adam Kotsko is a philosopher of, I guess, at least some repute, but I know him best for two things. One, he wrote a really sharp piece about the college literacy crisis, one that I actually assign in my 101 classes and students tend to respond to really well. Second, he is a prolific poster on Reddit, usually on the "Daystrom Insitute" subreddit, which is devoted to highly detailed analysis of Star Trek. (You might think this would be my jam, but after about a year of subscribing I left the sub because 1) they are too much focused on producing convoluted in-universe theories, and 2) they don't allow jokes!)

Thus he is the kind of person some call an "aca-fan." As an academic and a fan myself, I have read a lot of aca-fan work and seen a lot of aca-fan presentations at conferences... and to be honest, I mostly hate it. In my experience, there are largely two kinds of bad aca-fan work. The first are ones who are good fans but bad academics. Lots of enthusiasm for, say, Doctor Who, but little academic rigor; their fannish instincts overwhelm the analysis. Too many fandom comments or jokes, a lack of real engagement with the text in question. I once saw a presentation at a conference and when I asked a question applying one thing the presenter had said to a different aspect of the text, the answer was basically, "Well, it's just a tv show. It's for fun!" I mean, if that's your attitude, why are you here to begin with. (Literally while I was writing this post a friend texted me to complain she was at a talk that was "just heart eyes as a talk.")

But there's another type of bad aca-fan in my opinion, the one who is not actually a very good fan. They've watched some Doctor Who, but they seem unaware that there's a whole rich universe of fan discourse, they are unfamiliar with the production history or whatever; they just bring their academic framework of choice to the text but don't really engage with its nuances because they don't know it. To me, this one is almost worst, because why are you even doing this if you don't really know the thing you're analyzing? (A good example of both of these problems is the book Doctor Who in Time and Space, which I read and reviewed about a decade ago.)

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era
by Adam Kotsko

Published: 2025
Read: July 2025

I am pleased to say that Kotsko has produced a book that is characteristic of neither approach. Late Star Trek is a monograph about Star Trek that takes inventively as its unit of analysis the period from 2001 to the present: Enterprise, the novels produced while there were no shows on the air, the reboot film trilogy, and the streaming shows from Paramount+. Kotsko's argument is that this is the era where the people making Star Trek "made Star Trek that is about its status as Star Trek, rather than simply doing what people like about Star Trek" (27). The shows (and books and comics) became self-conscious in a way that sometimes paid off... but often did not.

Kotsko's approach is a careful one overall; he is attentive to both the details of the texts themselves and the nuances of their production. He knows his stuff as a fan (for the most part), but he also is never blinded by his fanboyism. I thought his analysis was overall quite strong—which might be to say, he usually says things that I agreed with! I was struck by his observation that basically every post-2001 incarnation of Star Trek has been about terrorism to some degree, a choice that made sense in 2001 but maybe not so much that we should still be making it twenty years later. I felt like there is probably more for some future writer to dig into here—is it an expression of our contemporary lack of belief in utopian futures? or an expression of the old Jameson canard about the end of the world vs. the end of capitalism? or frustration with the continuation of the surveillance state long past its supposed rationale?

His consideration of Enterprise is a good one, pointing out the ways in which the show was kind of misconceived, but kind of worked sometimes, and ultimately had to be reinvented two times across its four-year run. Many people think that the fourth season redeemed the show, and though he kinds of leans in this direction, he also points out its failings, such as the fact that it basically stopped pretending to even care about its characters, just turning them into observers for moments of fan service.

I did find the weakest part was his analysis of the so-called "novelverse," the interconnected web of novels that ran from 2001 to the debut of Picard in 2020 continuing the twenty-fourth-century shows beyond their screen end point. This is probably because he clearly is a fan of what they did, whereas I (as I have chronicled exhaustively in a series of posts on this blog) have largely been skeptical, if not exhausted, by many of the choices the so-called "Destiny-era novels" have made; I would argue they commit many of the same mistakes he later identifies in Picard, just differently.  In particular, it seems to me that the novels are just as suffused by the un-Star Trekky cynicism he criticizes Picard for (I write this in the middle of reading Available Light, where far too many characters seem to think carrying out coups against democratically elected leaders is just one of those things), but he doesn't discuss that.

I think probably Kotsko just has a different register of enjoyment than me when it comes to storyworlds—I think he's more into the building of continuity as an end in itself. Not to the extent of some fans, but you can definitely see it in the three "novelverse" authors he singles out for praise: Kirsten Beyer, Christopher L. Bennett, and David Mack. Beyer I can't really comment on (I only read the first of her "Voyager relaunch" novels and decided it wasn't for me, and it does seem like Kotsko considers it the weakest), but Bennett and Mack are probably my least favorite of the regular writers of the Destiny-era books, both having in my opinion a poor command of characterization. Still, though, I appreciate his detailed attention to the novels, and that it comes from a place of consideration and love; it was this part of the book that made me wonder what kind of "aca-fan" work I might pitch if I were to build a glass house for others to throw stones at.

He makes good points about the so-called "Kelvin timeline" films, especially their weirdly repetitive structure and self-referentiality (each one is about Starfleet needing to get back to doing Starfleet things... instead, you know, just making a movie about doing Starfleet things), and he rightly explains why Star Trek Beyond is the best one. I really liked his analysis of how the Kelvin comics (which I haven't gotten to yet except for Countdown, Nero, and Spock: Reflections) tried to make the flawed conception of the reboot films work as a basis for ongoing stories. I am doubtful there are more invested academic analyses of Star Trek comics out there than this!

I liked the whole book, as you can tell, but I found Kotsko's takes on Discovery and Picard particularly potent. Like me, he sees the first season of Discovery as its strongest despite its missteps; he sees the third season onward as competent but ultimately boring. Similarly, he thinks the original premise of Picard was its most interesting even though the way the first season ended was disastrous, and though everyone likes to dump on season two of Picard, I was gratified for his detailed takedown of the flaws of season three. As he says, each season of Picard is basically a new show that seemingly demonstrates contempt for the previous seasons of the show.

There are some small flaws, such as details gotten wrong: he calls Pocket editor Marco Palmieri "Mark," says there were three cancelled Kelvin timeline novels but there were actually four. The most egregious factual error is that the timeline in appendix 2 is completely useless because it gives all the twenty-fourth-century shows twenty-third-century dates and thus intermixes them with the original series. 

Probably the thing that bothered me most is that Kotsko's experience of Star Trek fandom is primarily based on Reddit, and reflects some of its idiosyncrasies seemingly without recognizing that they are idiosyncrasies, such as his use of the terms "alpha canon" and "beta canon," terms that really aren't used elsewhere, and which are misleading, since "beta canon" is definitionally actually not canonical! Obviously I'm biased, but the TrekBBS is mentioned/cited only a couple times (including a thread I myself participated in), but I think it has a more production-focused user base that would have counterbalanced the more lore-focused user base of Reddit. (And given him more insight into some areas he is interested in, such the reception of Enterprise season three. That said, I appreciate that a detailed discussion of Enterprise's famous season three episode "The Interregnum" is included in a scholarly work!)

Overall, this is an incisive piece of criticism; Kotsko is an academic and a fan, and in the best sense of both words. It gave me some good stuff to chew on, I zipped through it in just a day and a half, and I'm curious to check out some of the work he cites as well.

Star Trek: Toward the Night by James Swallow

The most recent tie-in novel to the best of the Paramount+ Star Trek shows comes from James Swallow, who is probably my second favorite of the current working Star Trek novelists. So this is a combination I was particularly looking forward to, especially as I very much enjoyed the previous SNW novel, Asylum.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night
by James Swallow

Published: 2025
Acquired: April 2025
Read: June 2025

Toward the Night is set during the second season (there is a bizarrely specific "Historian's Note" explaining this) and focuses on the Enterprise tracking down a distress signal from a Starfleet vessel lost a century ago, from the Federation's early day. (There are a number of callbacks to Enterprise, but also Star Trek Beyond; the lost ship is Freedom-class, just like the USS Franklin the crashed ship from a century ago that the Enterprises finds in that story!)

There's a certain breed of tie-in novel, though, that I find frustratingly disappointing. Now, I think writing tie-ins can be tricky—and this is only made even moreso when you're trying into an television program that is still ongoing. But ideally, what makes a tie-in novel worth reading is that it can approach the characters novelistically, that it can give them a different kind of depth than a tv show can. Tv shows can give depth, of course, but the novel can carry you into the thoughts of someone in a way no visual representation ever can. I think the best tie-in novels leave you feeling like you learned something about a character you didn't already know. The obvious way is to do this via backstory—that's what McCormack did in Asylum—but it's not the only way. Ideally, the character is put in situations you haven't see and you get to see them react. John Jackson Miller did this to good effect in what is essentially the zeroth SNW novel, The Enterprise War, by showing us the Enterprise crew in a situation we hadn't seen them in before.

The trap that Toward the Night falls into—though I don't think "trap" is a terribly fair word for it, because this isn't remotely a bad book—is that Swallow does have a great handle on all the characters. In terms of voice and action, Swallow does a great job across the board, in small moments and big. Pike is recognizably Anson Mount, there are some good moments of apt humor from Spock; in particular Ortegas and (my favorite) La'an get some threads, and they are who they ought to be from the show. But though the book has the potential to tell us something new about these characters, I found it didn't really hit that point. We learn about about Ortegas's backstory, which I appreciate; one of the characters on the crashed ship is in her family, long thought dead of course. But I didn't think we learned much about her as a person, something about how she thinks or acts that we didn't already know, even though it seems like the potential was there, of course.

It's well put together, of course; like I said, Swallow is good at capturing character voices. The basic scenario is strong (I want to rip it off for an STA scenario, which is always a good sign), and the action is interesting and well done. (I did find the resolution to one dilemma particularly obvious, though.) But ultimately it's frustrating because I think the elements are here for a slightly better book than we got.

Star Trek: Asylum by Una McCormack

Strange New Worlds is by far my favorite of the Paramount+-era Star Trek shows, and Una McCormack is by far my favorite of the current stable of Star Trek novelists. Put these two together, and let's say that I was predisposed to like this book.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum
by Una McCormack

Published: 2024
Acquired and read: November 2024

So thankfully, I did. The book has two parallel narratives; in one, the Enterprise is assigned to Starbase 1 to assist with negotiations with a race of catlike aliens. These aliens turn out to 1) have a racial minority that they oppress, and 2) have been encountered by Una ("Number One") in her Academy days. As the novel goes on, the negotiations are complicated by mysterious acts of vandalism on behalf of the oppressed minority. In the other, we follow Una during her Academy days as she befriends those aliens, but also struggles with balancing all the other aspects of life she wants to participate in, including a Gilbert and Sullivan production and the maintenance class taught by the Enterprise's future chief engineer, Pelia ("The Broken Circle"). At the same time, she also meets Christopher Pike for the first time, as he returns to the Academy to give a lecture series for cadets in the midst of a personal crisis of his own.

I zipped through this on a plane ride during my Thanksgiving vacation, beginning it before the plane took off and finishing it before it touched down. McCormack's novels are always easy to read, but in a pleasurable, rewarding way: there's a real depth of characterization here missing from most tie-in fiction, which typically just aspires to make sure you can imagine that the actors are reading the lines. Una is the novel's standout, McCormack deftly using her backstory as someone who must "pass" in a society that discriminates against her to bring out the complexities of such an undertaking. How can Una advocate for other people to be who they are when she herself must deny who she is in order to survive? McCormack was in higher education for many years, and her depiction of Una draws on that to show off a very real type of person from academia, the one who wants to do everything but soon finds themself hitting their limitations.

On top of that, unlike many tie-in novels, it's thematically rich, dealing with the complexities of cultural oppression and cultural resistance. There are sfnal metaphors here for the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen in the US, the UK, and around the world when majority groups confront minority groups, and it all feels very real. I know many tie-in writers don't like it when I say things like this, but every time I read a Star Trek book by McCormack, typically the only thing I don't like about it is that it means McCormack hasn't written the great original sf novel about cultural clash that I truly believe she has within her! I read this at a rough time in my life, but like Bujold's Brother in Arms (which I read around the same time), it reminded me of what I needed to do: fulfill my obligations, both to myself and others, as ethically as possible.

I have some quibbles—Una has to make a mistake I really don't buy to set off the novel's present-day events, the Federation ambassador negotiating with the aliens seems to know curiously little of them—but there's a lot to like here. So far there's only two SNW novels, and I don't know how many more there will be in the long run, but I am willing to wager that this will be the best, unless of course McCormack writes another. (Shame about the incredibly bland cover.)

Star Trek: The High Country by John Jackson Miller

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country
by John Jackson Miller

John Jackson Miller provides the first Strange New Worlds tie-in novel—only he also wrote the earlier The Enterprise War, which was a SNW novel in all but name. I really enjoyed The Enterprise War, and have been really enjoying SWN season 1 (as of this writing, I am up to "Spock Amok"), so I was looking forward to this book quite a bit.

Published: 2023
Acquired: February 2023
Read: March 2023

I'm not attempting to diminish the book by saying it ought not to be a hardcover, but a mass-market paperback. That is to say, this book has to do what Star Trek books always used to have to do (but didn't do very much after Nemesis brought a halt to screen adventures for the twenty-fourth century) and slot in between existing episodes. Yet those old novels often  struggled to feel like novels, coming across more as inflated episodes. The High Country threads that needle nicely, giving us events big enough to merit a novel, but not so big that they feel like they disrupt the narrative of the tv show. A strange phenomenon causes Pike, Spock, Number One, and Uhura to be scattered across a strange planet, out of reach of the Enterprise. The novel follows the four of them as they explore this planet and reunite with one another, with some side scenes about the Enterprise crew. What initially seems to be a simple Prime Directive situation soon reveals itself to be part of a complicated, ancient undertaking that could threaten life throughout the quadrant.

The biggest strength of the book is its character voices; I felt that Miller particularly captured Pike, (Ethan Peck's) Spock, and Hemmer. The book is filled with good twists and turns and interesting imagery and cool concepts and neat side characters. I liked the Menders, I liked who rescued Spock, I liked Hemmer's plan, I liked the clever ways the Enterprise crew penetrated the strange phenomenon around the planet. I had a lot of fun with it, and it reads quickly.

I have two complaints, really. One is that a lot of the book hinges on a relationship between Pike and a guest character, and I wish we had more of a sense of it. I usually wouldn't advocate for such a thing, but a prologue flashing back to them in younger days might have been a good idea, and there's one weird bit where we're told they eat dinner together but don't actually get to see it. We're told what they don't talk about, but under the circumstances it's difficult to imagine what they do talk about, and it would be nice to see more of these two old friends. The other is that at the end, things got a bit fuzzy and drawn out, first with lots of talk of rondures, and then with what felt like a few too many epilogues, like watching The Return of the King.

But on the whole I enjoyed this. It captures the spirit of the parent show while also doing something it could never do, spend a protracted span of time exploring a single planet, its culture, and its population.

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part V: Novels and Books, 1993-Present

Continued from last month's discussion of older Star Trek books...

To understand how I came to even write this series, you might want to know how I shelve my Star Trek mass market paperbacks. (If you don't want to know this, and I don't blame you, just jump down to the break.)

In the past I have used various complicated systems (at one point, internal chronology! do not recommend), but now I just break them down by tv show: the original, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. (To date, there are no MMPBs based on the CBS All Access shows.) Then after that go all the books that tie into no particular series; these could be original-to-prose ongoing series like New Frontier and S.C.E., miniseries that span multiple series like Day of Honor and Gateways, miniseries that don't do that like Dark Passions and Typhon Pact, or standalones not based on one tv show like Articles of the Federation and Excelsior: Forged in Fire.

I shelve all my books in publication order, except that I put all the books in one series together at the point where the first was published. These books are immediately to the left of my desk and so I gaze at them a lot while avoiding work, and as I did so often, I started to realize there was a changing trajectory over time of how Star Trek books have dealt with the logos when there's no one tv show to tie into.

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This is more of a sidebar, but it's worth mentioning. In Aug. 1993, Simon & Schuster released Worf's First Adventure, the first Starfleet Academy middle-grade novel from its Minstrel Books imprint. These books would jump around the timeline, filling in the Starfleet Academy adventures of Worf, La Forge, Data, Picard, Crusher, Riker, and Troi (what, no Pulaski or Yar?). It was thus the first Star Trek book to feature (I think) a four-level title: Star Trek, series, subseries, book title. For the subseries, book title, and author name, the books would use Crillee Italic, the credits font from The Next Generation. This series ran five years and fourteen installments.

It lead to two more Starfleet Academy series, one for the original (with novels featuring Spock, McCoy, and Kirk) and one for Voyager (featuring Janeway). These maintained the Crillee Italic branding even though that had nothing to do with those tv show.

As I said in my last installment, around the time The Next Generation came out, the logos of Simon & Schuster's Star Trek books finally achieved some level of show-consistency and stability. But things would soon get complicated by the fact that S&S/Pocket started publishing Star Trek novels that didn't tie into any one series. What logo would you use then?

At first, they stuck with the original-series film logo, the logo that was also being used on Deep Space Nine and (soon) Voyager. The first time this happened was with Federation (Nov. 1994), an original series/Next Generation crossover novel. As you can see, this uses the slightly simplified, more generic version of the logo that was more prominent in the 1990s.

In June 1997, S&S released a novelization of the Interplay computer game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Weirdly, the novelization didn't use the game's logo design, but rather used Crillee Italic, tying it (design-wise, anyway) into S&S's middle-grade Starfleet Academy books.

In July 1997, Pocket introduced its first original ongoing Star Trek series. Peter David's New Frontier took place in the 24th century and incorporated a number of popular Next Generation guest stars into its cast. In a sense, it comes across as a third "show" to run alongside Deep Space Nine and Voyager. So it makes sense that like them, it uses the movie font for its title and subtitle. One of the things that I have always liked about this logo is that it incorporates a silhouette of the hero ship, the USS Excalibur; if I recall correctly, in promotional material there was a unique "NF" symbol in that spot, but then someone pointed out it was basically the same as the logo of the National Front! In the long run of this series, though, the Excalibur would be destroyed and replaced by a new ship of a different class; it always bothered me that the logo never updated to reflect this.

Pocket released another independent novel in Feb. 1998, Susan Wright's The Best and the Brightest. This followed a group of Starfleet Academy cadets across a two-year period. The cover uses the Next Generation logo, but I think this must have been a last-minute change to improve marketability, because the title page actually just calls it "Star Trek: The Best and the Brightest." The logo used is the film one, indicating it's a generic Star Trek product, not tied to any one series. I shelve it by spine logo, though, because that looks nicer.

(An early draft of the cover, which you can see on Memory Alpha, actually used the same Starfleet Academy logo from S&S's middle-grade books, along with the generic film logo. I get why they ultimately wouldn't want to use middle-grade branding for an adult-aimed novel.)

Similarly, Strange New Worlds, a series of anthologies with short stories spanning all four (later, all five) tv series launched in July 1998, and used the movie logo.

One of my favorite logo choices, however, came with Where Sea Meets Sky (Oct. 1998), an installment in The Captain's Table miniseries. This novel focused on Captain Pike, but instead of using the generic original series logo, it used a very bland one that had previously only been used on the unaired pilot featuring Pike, "The Cage." I don't know what your average book buyer thought of this deep-cut choice, but this book buyer had a big smile on his face when he discovered the book in Barnes & Noble, and even e-mailed editor John Ordover to thank him! (I would have been 13.)

Other original series novels would move away from the standard logo, too, usually to signify the era in which they were set. Though usually original series novels use the original logo even if set in the movie era, the New Earth miniseries of Summer 2000, for example, was set in the decade-long gap between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan, and used the film logo to signify that, meaning they stand out from the books on either side of them on the shelf.

I'm not always sure what the thinking was, though. The Case of the Colonist's Corpse (Dec. 2003) uses the Motion Picture logo but takes place during the original series. And I feel like the older logo would have better with the book's retro vibe!

On the other hand, I appreciate that Ex Machina (Dec. 2004), a direct follow-up to The Motion Picture, not only used the film logo, but used a version of it that aped the one used on the film, with long lines coming off the "S" and the "K."

There was a set of original series novels that actually used "The Original Series" in the logo, beginning with The Janus Gate (June 2002). I hate the use of "The Original Series" as a formal title (it's just Star Trek, damnit!), and I particularly don't like the way it was done here, which just looks clunky. These novels were marketed as re-telling the story of the original series from the point-of-view of an expanded cast, a sort of "TOS relaunch," but apparently no one told the authors this. After six novels in three months, the concept was quietly dropped, and future original series novels were just Star Trek once more.

The next original-to-prose series concept to come along was in Aug. 2000: the ebook-original S.C.E., about the adventures of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Like New Frontier, this was set in the 24th century, and like New Frontier, it used the DS9/Voyager logo as its base, but the logo used on the first three books is, like most elements of the first three covers, pretty crappy. Like, c'mon, what is even going on there? The weird downward curve on the "S.C.E." would be bad enough on its own, but the way it has to work with the periods makes it even worse.

Clearly, though, those involved recognized that, and by the fourth book (Feb. 2001), a new logo would be introduced. The font used on the subtitle (as well as in the titles of the books) is "Crillee Italic," the font used in the credits of The Next Generation, so a nice Star Trekkian choice.

May 2001 brought a major change in Star Trek publishing. The so-called "Deep Space Nine relaunch," debuting with the Avatar duology, was a continuation of the DS9 television shows, telling its own ongoing stories, mixing old characters with new. It was also the first time Pocket had deliberately chosen to not use the logo of the television show. I seem to recall editor Marco Palmieri saying the new logo, which was thicker and simpler, would work better and be more flexible on book covers. The font was an appropriately DS9-y one, though; "ITC Handel Gothic" was the font the show had always used for credits and episode titles.

There weren't many of them, but the original DS9 logo continued to be used on books set during the run of the show, such as Prophecy and Change (Sept. 2003) and Hollow Men (Apr. 2005).

The original Star Trek fiction series Challenger used the movie font, too, like to many others. It lasted a whopping one book (Aug. 2001). (Author Diane Carey made fun of script of the Enterprise series premiere in her novelization of it, and when the producers realized this had happened, she promptly never wrote another Star Trek book ever again.)

And, finally, the first two books of Star Trek: Stargazer (May 2002) used the film logo. There were any number of standalone non-series novels using it too; I'm not showing you everything! I always kind of liked this one; the sunburst in the "G" is cute.

But that would be it, because Dec. 2002's The Brave and the Bold duology would eschew the original film logo for the "Serpentine" one used on the Next Generation films. As you will recall from earlier installments of this series, this logo had debuted with 1994's Star Trek Generations, but outside of film novelizations, hadn't seen use on the covers of Star Trek books. (Serpentine was, however, used for the names of books and authors on Next Generation novels from Oct. 1995's The Last Stand through Mar. 2002's A Hard Rain, the so-called "rainbow stripe" era of cover design, exemplified by Best and the Brightest above.)

From then on, basically every Star Trek book didn't tie into a specific series (or that spanned multiple ones) would use Serpentine. Preexisting series even had their logos adjusted to fit the new Serpentine paradigm, such as Stargazer, which debuted a new look with book three, the creatively titled Three, in Aug. 2003. (Book five would introduce yet another new logo, though still Serpentine-based, and then the series would be cancelled with book six.)

Strange New Worlds would also switch over with book eight. This was published in July 2005, so it was a couple years behind on the switch.

That was nothing compared to New Frontier, though, which finally changed over in Apr. 2009. The new logo is pretty bland (I think almost all the Serpentine-based logos are, to be honest), but at least it meant the anachronistic silhouette was gone.

The best Serpentine-based logo was the one for Titan, the series about Riker's command, which began with Taking Wing in Apr. 2005. It's the one that best mimics what the films were doing: like on the poster logos for Generations, First Contact, and Insurrection, the subtitle is written in a tall narrow sans serif ("Seven," apparently). Plus a strong sense of composition (Cliff Nielsen, of course), and on the physical book, the subtle embossing on the second TITAN all combine to create a striking package.

One of the most apt uses of Serpentine, however, came with the A Time to... maxiseries that began with A Time to Be Born in Feb. 2004. This nine-book saga chronicled what the Enterprise crew had been up to between Insurrection and Nemesis, and one thing I liked was that though they were all The Next Generation novels, none of them used "The Next Generation" on the covers. But of course, neither did the films they were connecting, so it was entirely appropriate. 

Because of the logo, I opt to shelve these books with my non-series novels, because it looks nice. In fact, the stretch from Stargazer: Three to Articles of the Federation is one of the longest on my shelves of a relatively consistent logo.

There was one exception during the Serpentine era: Star Trek: Vanguard, which debuted in Aug. 2005. This was a rare original ongoing with a 23rd-century setting, and for that reason, I assume, used the original Star Trek logo as its basis. (The spine design even kind of makes it look like a Star Trek novel called Vanguard: Harbinger, as opposed to a Star Trek: Vanguard novel called Harbinger.)

This is kind of a side note, but I did really like the "livery" that was wrapped around the original series logo for the 40th anniversary in 2006. All original series novels publishes that year had it, and it looks classy as heck.

When Voyager had its own post-series "relaunch," it didn't change its logo-- but The Next Generation did. Death in Winter (Sept. 2005) began a new approach for TNG novels, following on from Nemesis, and a totally new logo. As you can see, it's a total departure from the original Next Generation logo, a pretty generic serif. It took me a while even with font-matching web sites to figure out what it was, because there are a million like it. Some say it's "Palatino," but the "T" isn't right; I finally matched the "T" to that of "Rotis Serif." (And then found an old post by editor Marco Palmieri where he said what it was.)

When it first debuted, I was in a mental mode where I had to defend all of S&S's editorial choices, so I defended this. Now though... I think it's going for "classy and elegant" and ends up coming out "bland." I mean, you could do worse, but it just doesn't look science fiction-y at all. Which I suspect is kind of the point, but that's a bad point. I get why maybe someone wanted the 1980stastic original to go, but I don't believe this was the best replacement. It wasn't just applied to "TNG relaunch" novels either, as this logo also appeared on the prequel The Buried Age (July 2007) and the mostly-set-during-the-series anthology The Sky's the Limit (Sept. 2007).

In the meantime, we got a couple other unique logos. The Terok Nor miniseries, which began with Apr. 2008's Day of the Vipers was a prequel to Deep Space Nine, and used the variant of Handel Gothic originally developed for the DS9 relaunch for a unique logo.

The Destiny miniseries (Oct. 2008–Feb. 2009) also sported a unique logo, using the same font as Generations and First Contact did for their in-film logos, ITC Benguiat. Now, this is a classy serif, and I feel like would have made a much better basis for the TNG relaunch logo. But it was only used on these four books.

After this, though, Rotis took over. It suddenly became not just the font for The Next Generation novels, but the go-to font for non-series novels, beginning with the Typhon Pact miniseries in Oct. 2010, and subsequently continuing into Department of Temporal Investigations, The Fall miniseries, and the last two Section 31. Serpentine is out! (Except that Titan has never updated its cover font.) Only the most recent Next Generation novel, Oct. 2019's Collateral Damage, has moved away from it, restoring the classic tv logo, probably because with Picard, a more casual audience is more likely to be looking at TNG novels once more. (Though what that "casual" audience would make of Collateral Damage, which pays off a fifteen-years-running subplot from the novels, I've no idea.)

I actually used Rotis to resolve an ambiguity: James Swallow's Cast No Shadow (July 2011) is just called "Star Trek." It takes place several years after The Undiscovered Country, and features Valeris from that film. So is it an original series novel? Or a non-series one? Well, given it uses a Rotis logo, we can safely assume non-series, because it looks nicer shelved between Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History and The Fall: Revelation and Dust than it would between The Children of Kings and A Choice of Catastrophes. 

With Jan. 2013's Allegiance in Exile, these things would become much less ambiguous, as "The Original Series" was restored to the logo again, and this time it was here to stay. Thanks, I hate it, but at least it was done tastefully this time.

William Shatner released ten Star Trek novels beginning with June 1997's The Ashes of Eden, which all followed the branding trends of their time: the original film logo for the first seven, Serpentine for the next two. However, the last one, Oct. 2007's Academy: Collision Course, used a very non-science-fiction looking logo in a generic sans serif. If there had been more "Academy" novels, I imagine they would have gone on the same, but I think they came to an end because the incoming reboot films were covering similar ground.

When S.C.E. relaunched as Corps of Engineers in Nov. 2009, I suppose it was just a bit too early for the Rotis revolution. I wonder if it would have used Rotis if it had come along a mite later, but as it was, it kept the movie font for the "Star Trek." For the subtitle, it switched to what I think is a Jeffries Extended font, the typeface used on the hull of Starfleet vessels, which was previously used as a logo on Enterprise and subsequently on Discovery. Note that the name changed because it was felt "S.C.E." was pretty inscrutable. It is, but I'm not sure putting the word "CORPS" biggest screams fun action-adventure. If they really wanted to make the series more accessible, they should have called it Star Trek: Miracle Workers!

S&S began a new Starfleet Academy series in Nov. 2010, this one tying into the 2009 film, showing what the original crew got up to during the three-year jump between Kirk enrolling in the Academy and the attack by Nero. These used the classic original series font for "Starfleet Academy"... but nothing at all for "Star Trek"! No Star Trek books have done this before or since as far as I know (except for, of course, the ones based on Enterprise).

July 2014 began another original series, Seekers. Seekers is a Vanguard spin-off, and its cover aesthetic is inspired by the old James Blish novelizations (covered in my previous post), by way of a series of tributes by artist Rob Caswell. I like the idea, but I found Caswell's for-fun tributes more successful than the actual published Seekers covers. I think it's because the cover ended up having five different typefaces on it! One for "STAR TREK," one for "SEEKERS" and the author name, one for the giant number, one for the New York Times bit, and one for the title. It just loses all sense of cohesion, and I don't get why some of those couldn't have been the same. (I am pretty sure the Seekers subtitle is Jeffries Extended again.) The original Blish covers and Caswell's original tributes have a simplicity and power this overly busy cover fails to recapture.

The most recent novel-original concept is Star Trek: Prometheus. This trilogy, begun in July 2016, was originally published in German. Its logo is, in fact, a war crime. The "STAR TREK" part is okay. It uses what I think is "Cimiez RomanDemiSerif," which has actually been used as a typeface for titles and author names on a number of Next Generation covers, including The Cold Equations trilogy and The Stuff of Dreams. But what's up with those big lowercase "e"s? And just because the mythical Prometheus gave fire to humanity doesn't justify something as tacky as MAKING YOUR LOGO ON FIRE! (Plus it's totally unsuited to the slow, plodding nature of the trilogy.)

When Titan translated the novels into English (beginning in Nov. 2017), they kept the Cimiez, but came up with some much duller for the "PROMETHEUS." I'm grateful, I suppose, but this is actually so boring I feel like they overcompensated.

 

 

 

 

And that, I think, brings us up to date! I'm sure there's some keystone cover of modern Star Trek books I've missed, but I think those are the significant font and design choices of the last two decades of Star Trek fiction. This whole five-part (and probably, eventually, six, though geeze I need a break) series is down to me noticing all the Serpentine on my shelf, so finally I got to talk about that bit!

Most cover art supplied by LibraryThing. Specifically, most of that was due to one dude, CoreyScott, who has uploaded tons of high-quality scans of tie-in book overs to LibraryThing over the years. Thanks also to the commenters on the TrekBBS for their feedback, especially user DarkHorizon who alerted me to the solicitation cover of The Best and the Brightest; I made some updates on 16 Feb. because of it, adding all the various Starfleet Academy novels.

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part III: Television, 2017-Present

Continued from my discussion of The Next Generation tv show and films, plus Enterprise, three weeks ago...

After twelve years away, Star Trek finally returned to television (kind of) with the debut of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present). Discovery featured a new logo with a new typeface:

Peters over at FontShop identifies it as a customized version of "Redrail Superfast." Here's how the logo would look if rendered in the actual Redrail Superfast:

The main change I can identify is the removal of the more finicky serifs: in the base font, almost every letter has these points that go out and then down, but in the Discovery logo, they just go out, if they're there at all. It is somewhat reminiscent of the original Star Trek logo... but I am not a fan. I think it's two things: those Rs look off to me, imbalanced in some way, and only clearly Rs because of the surrounding context. The other is that its finickiness means it doesn't read well from a distance, unlike most other Star Trek logos. I think about this a lot because I shelve my Star Trek trade paperbacks in the dining room and often stare at my bookshelf while trying to get my son to slowly work his way through a meal:

Maybe the coloring is partially the issue, but I don't think the Disco logo stands out as well as the Deep Space Nine or Enterprise logos to either side of it; the novel titles are also in the customized Redrail Superfast, and similarly hard to make out, something the S&S cover designer seems to have admitted when they changed font for the sixth Disco novel.

As I mentioned in part I, the Picard (2020-present) promotional materials used the classic Star Trek font:

The subtitle font could be a number of different sans serifs, but I am pretty sure it is "DIN Condensed."

However, the logo that appeared on literally every piece of Picard tie-in material and advertising was not the logo used in the actual show! The actual show's logo looked like this:

It maintains the DIN Condensed for the subtitle (and in fact, the whole title sequence uses DIN Condensed for credits), but the "STAR TREK" is in Redrail Superfast. This was used in the show's title sequence and, as far as I can tell, literally nowhere else!

I think what happened here is an attempt at branding cohesion that someone changed their minds on at the last minute, because when the cartoon Lower Decks debuted later in 2020, this was its logo:

We have the classic "Star Trek" font for the series title, combined with a unique font for the subtitle. I couldn't find anyone on the Internet stating what the subtitle font is, nor could I figure it out myself; I suspect it's a heavily customized version of something preexisting, if not bespoke. It's definitely going for a comedy vibe, but it's also a little reminiscent of the classic TNG font, I think, with the gaps in the R and the D. (Here's a good post at the TrekBBS where a poster imagines what the logo would look like if it used the actual TNG font.) I should note that for its credits and episode titles, Lower Decks uses the exact font TNG used for those things, "Crillee Italic."

So we have a bit of a pattern emerging in the CBS All Access era, with classic "Star Trek" title and unique subtitle. This would be confirmed when Discovery returned for its third season in late 2020, debuting an all-new logo:

Aha, it all fits together! "Star Trek" for the title; "Eurostile" for the subtitle. Eurostile is one of the fonts used for the livery of Starfleet vessels; it's pretty close to what was used for the Enterprise logo, in fact. Interestingly, though, when the season three premiere debuted on CBSAA, it still used Redrail Superfast for the "Star Trek" part, but later they went back and changed it. So it seems like someone decided they wanted a consistent logo, but late in the game, it was decided that the "Star Trek" font was a better choice for this than Redrail Superfast.

I agree, though there's something indelibly original series about that logo that makes it an odd fit for a universal Star Trek brand. Maybe if it had been used all along, but as I discussed in part I, it has pretty much been contained to the original show and things meant to evoke it. It just seems wrong having it attached to a show about Picard! Surely it should have been something like this:

(forgive my crude mock-up)

The next Star Trek show we know anything concrete about is Prodigy, the Nickelodeon cartoon, which will air in 2021. It keeps the theme going:

There's also the Captain Pike spin-off, Strange New Worlds, but no logo has been released for that yet. Based on the current conformity of the CBSAA era, though, I think we can guess pretty safely what font will be used for the "Star Trek" part of the title, at least!

Continue on to next month's discussion of the fonts of the books...

Archival Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 9 edited by Dean Wesley Smith with Elisa J. Kassin and Paula M. Block

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 9

edited by Dean Wesley Smith
with Elisa J. Kassin and Paula M. Block

Trade paperback, 384 pages. Published 2006.  Acquired July 2006.  Read October 2007.

I got this book at Shore Leave, back in July 2006, and I finally got around to reading it.  A common theme in this report, I know.  Pretty much on par with previous volumes of the Strange New Worlds series, the standout story was "The Last Tree on Ferenginar: A Ferengi Fable from the Future" by Mike McDevitt, though the one where Reed and Porthos switched bodies ("Rounding a Corner Already Turned" by Allison Cain) was pretty good too.